Coming up for air

My apologies for the sparse and erratic posting of late, but it appears to be a semi-hiatus well spent.

On March 21, Robert Dickson and I are launching The Carrboro Citizen–a new community newspaper for Carrboro and its surrounding communities. You can read about it here, here, here, here and in this wonderful, welcoming DTH editorial. And, of course, feel free to visit the Citizen’s first blog, The Mill.

One of the big decisions I had to make in committing to the paper was what to do with my blogs–namely this one and The Cape Fear Mercury. Like any decent blog the two grew out of my interest in state politics and public policy and in the natural history, people and places of North Carolina. Like any blog that keeps going for a while they both went in directions I hadn’t planned. During last year’s hurricane season, the Merc morphed into a weather blog. A month before, most posts were about Down East. Nowadays, it’s all about nature and travel.

Meanwhile, Exile on Jones Street, became the driver for the print column and the place to experiment with the blog first/print later technique of building a weekly column through blogging. That got all mixed up during the legislative session when putting up audio from hearings became a focus. Then there was that election and becoming a regular at BlueNC.

After doing a lot of listening in the past few months to what people in Carrboro were reading, wanted to read and wanted out of a newspaper, it became clear that the subjects covered in these blogs, particularly Exile’s look at legislative issues and the Merc’s travel and natural history themes, are of sufficient interest to the good people of Carrboro to warrant the effort to keep both blogs burning.

So look for Exile to return to print in the Triangle in the pages of the Carrboro Citizen and look for Merc photos, stories and travels there as well.

Also, since there seems to be an interest in my keeping track of how this idea of starting a newspaper in the 21st Century is going, I’ve created a new catagory here called Newspapering.

Now, if I can get all the patches to make 2.1.1 work right in plaintxt, I’ll be in great shape.

See you in the paper.

(Shorter version of this post: I’ve decided to keep both this blog and the Merc up and operating and use them to produce content for the newspaper. )